- How does the division of people begin? Where does the division of power come from? Who decides what race and what gender is more dominant? Where did oppression come from?
I’ve spent hours asking myself these questions and wondering where oppression comes from. I often look at a mothers role in society as one of the hardest roles, without a woman to bear children how else would anyone get here. A man ultimately comes from a woman so what and who gave them the right to oppress woman. But perhaps this idea is what is setting woman behind. This idea that they are the “bearer or meaning and not the makers of meaning” a quote imposed by Laura Mulvey. She brought up this idea that it is not the woman makes the child who he or she is. It isn’t from the woman in which the child inherits its mindset perhaps if the child is innovated…but its from the mother that they get their nurturing. As if the mother is a temporary caretaker. This idea of motherhood gets diminished.
I ran into a book called, Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale by Maria Mies. Maria Miles is a German Professor who is responsible for writing very many books about feminism and different woman inequalities from the past and the present. She currently teaches at a University in Germany but she has visited and got different perspectives from America, Germany and India where. she spent a lot of her time. This book is so significant because she analyzes the origins of woman’s oppression by dating back to the earliest civilizations where society merely relied on hunting and gathering.
According to Maria Mies theory; Men were labeled as “hunters” and given deadly weapons to kill off animals and ultimately bring them back home. When brought home, woman were labeled as “gatherers”, their role was to collect the food that the men hunted and to cook it and have it freshly served when the man came home. Except….her idea of where this oppression came from did not directly come from the different roles that each person held in society, it came from what they did during the role. When men hunted and killed animals they saw themselves as being more dominant that the animal given they had the power to destroy a life with their aggressiveness and weapons. They viewed animals as the supplies of food to meet their needs and the ability to breed and make more animals to meet their need. These two factors were also jobs of the gatherer, or the woman, who had to cook dinner to meet the mans need and had to have children once again for a man. So overtime, this ideology that woman are merely harmless animals made men believe that they had this power over a woman.
Most woman could not become hunters because of the intense workout that was required to do it, this included running for miles and dodging and different difficult physical activities. Woman often got pregnant because men were uneducated on the different ways in modern day in which we have the ability to not have kids after every time of intercourse. Because the woman were always getting pregnant, with pregnancy it was hard for them to get involved in physical activity, therefore they were obligated to doing the more submissive jobs. Although we have new ways to have protected sex and to avoid running into this problem, most ideologies don’t change and become embedded in people and these ideologies are passed down for generations. Even as things evolve, someone can still carry these different assumptions or perspectives on life. Some people also like to live in this ignorance because it is what they are comfortable with and they don’t want to have to change. I don’t always blame them because I know that there are topics that I am not 100 percent confident in my knowledge in those area but I haven’t taken the time to get to know more.
Reflecting off of Maria Mies views, it’s evident that her thesis would be that the roles of men as the hunter and their domanince over animals and the comparison of woman to animals is the reason that oppression began, is quite the argument. In my opinion I believe that these early roles set modern Day roles, but I don’t believe that this should have led to oppression directly. I believe that the competitiveness that was developed in a man is the reason oppression began, this idea of always being in control. The idea of getting comfortable being in control and not willing to look at a different point of view. I believe that our general problem in modern day society continues to date back to history and previous beliefs.